Looking Back

October 1933

The Church Museum

Curious Relics which bring History to Life

By R.F. Dunnett, MA

Throughout its long history, drama and romance have accompanied the development of the Scottish Church. Personalities who are only names to us were known by the clothes they affected, the hand they wrote, the trinkets they carried. These things gave them an individuality which we to-day would be glad to recapture. It is because we do recapture something of this that we thrill at the sight of, say, the cane John Knox possessed, with its sturdy, polished shaft and heavy brass handle ornamented with flower designs. Even the splintered end seems to enrich our understanding of the man.

Such in the effect of the Church Museum in the Tolbooth Church, Castlehill, Edinburgh. To visit it (it is open free every Wednesday from 10 to 1) is to reconstruct out of the fragments which have been patiently gathered together the great dramatic pageant of the Church’s progress from the time of the Reformation to the present day.

If the visitor is fortunate, he may find the Rev John Campbell, BD., the minister of the Church, in the Library or the Museum. Mr Campbell is deeply interested in the collection of relics and has a wide knowledge of their history and significance, which he is always ready to place at the disposal of the curious.

One of the first things he will indicate is the Covenanters’ Room, which has come into being largely as the result of gifts from the Rev Dr J King Hewison.

Together with valuable modern works, are many interesting old books. A seventeenth century edition of Shields’ Hind Let Loose, Popery Anatomised, Naphthali; a first edition dating 1667, are examples. This last book is interesting, as it contains the last words and prayers of many of those who were martyred for their faith.

Martyrdom was not the only fate to befall the Covenanters, exile was another possibility; and, Dr King Hewison believes, it was exiled Covenanters who made communion cups out of cocoa-nuts. Two such cups are in the museum; the bowls consist of literally halved cocoa-nut shell, highly polised and finished with a rim of gold. The stems and bases of the cups are of ordinary carved and polished wood. The cups are in two easily detachable pieces, the lower part being screwed into the bowl; they were easily carried and concealed. Also made from a half cocoa-nut is a small gold rimmed bowl, which, Dr Hewison suggests, may have been used for baptisms. The vessels were probably made in the West Indies.

Behind the cups, and in the same case is the sword of Daniel MacMichael, who was shot at Nether Dalveen on 31st January 1685. Passing from this, one’s attention is immediately arrested by two small glass dishes, actually a salt-cellar and a mustard dish, which belonged to Alexander Peden. The dishes are finely made; the stem of one is gracefully ornamented by white spun-glass threads, and broader bands of the same white glass relieve the transparency of the other parts.

Peden, with his famous wig and mask is also represented in the pictures round the walls.

It would be easy to spend a whole day in the Covenanters Room alone, but many other objects of interest are to be found in other parts of the building.

There is the Moderators’ Room, where there are photographs of the Moderators of many generations. In this room also there is a fine collection of many varieties of communion tokens. These metal discs in the shape of squares, rectangles, hearts, stars, and so on, could be studied for hours. Here, too, is the pulpit from which Ebenezer Erskine preached on 7th September 1731. It is of dark-brown paneled wood and, round the top, the sides are covered with red, padded cloth.

In the next room are hung pictures of Lord High Commissioners. A few stone communion tokens and John Knox’s staff attract attention. Some will also be interested in the first edition of the Paraphrases (1745), with its introductory note in which the hesitant attitude of the Church to this innovation is revealed.  The General Assembly of that year was too busy to consider the question of paraphrases and Church worship as fully as was necessary; the matter was remitted to the Presbyteries for their careful consideration. This was the beginning of a long argument, and to this day, paraphrases are in some places regarded with suspicion.

A pulpit sand-glass, which is over 300 years old, recalls by its size the spacious sermons of earlier days. Near the sand-glass are the pewter communication cups from St Kilda, and close to them is a strongly made hand-bell which dates to 1626 or possibly to pre-Reformation times and was the instrument by which the members of Kiltarlity Church were once summoned to worship.

Lastly, we come to the cases in the Library. Here of special interest are the Bible used by Archbishop Sharp, when minister of Crail; a Manchurian hymn-book; the great seals attached to the ‘King’s Letters,’ used respectively by George III, William IV, Victoria, and by the present King in 1914, but for which there is now substituted a seal of more convenient size.

Mention should, however, be made of the specimen of the brooches struck on the occasion of the Disruption. In the centre of this brooch the graves of the martyrs are represented with the burning bush and the motto – ‘Nec tamen consumebatur’; on the bands at the sides are inscribed the dates of important events in the history of the Church. This device is symbolical of the effect which an examination, however brief, of the various exhibits has on the visitor. From each stage of the Church’s history some relics have been preserved. To study them, and meditate on them, is to enliven one’s conception of the history and character of our greatest national institution.

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